The Truth About Your Cycling Helmet

Mark Strohman

Bike Legal COO and avid cyclist advocating for sharing the road responsibly.

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Cycling is a fantastic aerobic exercise, and exercise is something Americans need to do with much more frequency. It has much less impact on the joints than running and is arguably more enjoyable than working out indoors. It is much more stimulating to see the outside world - to experience sunshine and feel the wind in your face rather than stare at a screen on the treadmill at the gym. It’s also a way to get to work or go to the grocery store while saving gas and feeling better in the process.

Cycling is more than exercise. It’s a lifestyle, with a culture and a community all its own.

As far as healthy lifestyles go, cycling is hard to beat.

There Are Too Many Preventable Cycling Injuries

As healthy and as beneficial as cycling is, it’s not without its perils. In 2020 there were over 325,000 bicycle accident injuries, and there were 1,260 deaths related to bicycle collisions or other bike accidents. And that’s not all. Accoding to the National Safety Council, one in every three non-fatal bicycling injuries are head injuries - over 80,000 a year, which makes cycling the most hazardous sport for your head, more so than even football.

Head injuries create additional suffering. With most other injuries, whether a broken bone or a torn ligament, doctors can see and diagnose the injury with an X-ray or a CT scan, and broken bones and torn ligaments usually heal completely with the proper treatment. Head injuries are often invisible but can nevertheless cause long lasting symptoms for the sufferer which aren’t always obvious to the outside observer and are even harder to diagnose and treat.

Whether a bike accident results in a concussion or a more serious traumatic brain injury, or TBI, this type of bicycle injury can cause cognitive, physical and or behavioral problems, often permanently. A brain injury doesn’t just cause pain, it can dramatically affect how we think, and this can be terrifying to the sufferer because our thinking is the key to our identity

The most serious bicycle injuries often involve collisions with cars, but not always. A bike crash that results in a bicycle injury can just as likely occur from running over a pothole or losing one’s balance on the bike and just tipping over and falling sideways. Sometimes simply falling over and hitting your head against the hard asphalt is all it takes to damage that more vulnerable side of your skull, which can result in a serious bicycle injury or TBI.

Sources:

- National Safety Council

- National Library of Medicine

One Simple Material Can Help Prevent Many Cycling Injuries

Don’t let that scare you away from cycling outdoors in favor of Peloton. There is an easy protective measure for possible bicycling accidents, and it comes from a material that is all around us and in common day to day use.

Extruded polystyrene, which is commonly known by its trademarked name, Styrofoam, is used all the time in products such as packing material or food containers. Those coffee cups that insulate your hot drinks, or those cheap ice chests you buy at the gas station that break after the first use; they are all made from tiny little polystyrene pebbles.

Anyone who has tried to clean up broken polystyrene packing material knows the frustration of trying to sweep those little white balls into a dustpan, only to have them float away and back underneath the furniture.

Bean bag chairs, once popular in the 1970s, which are filled with polystyrene pebbles, probably fell out of favor after parents had to clean up the debris from kids aggressively jumping on them one too many times. The very thing that makes polystyrene the ideal insulating material for your Amazon packages and a frustrating mess to clean up after also make it the ideal material for bicycle safety in the form of bicycle helmets

Sources:

- JSTOR Daily

- ICA

How Helmets Protect Our Heads

Our skulls are pretty amazing examples of evolutionary design. That hard, protective layer of bone is given the responsibility of protecting our single most important organ - our brain, but evolution didn’t anticipate our heads hitting hard asphalt from cycling accidents. This is where modern cycling helmets constructed from EPS are essential.

Nearly all helmets are constructed of a thin, outer shell of ABS plastic, which is tough and resists breaking due to impacts, and an inner core of our EPS foam we’ve been talking about, which is designed to crush, break, and even disintegrate from hard impact. Think of those crumple zones that are designed into modern cars. They are designed to absorb the energy from an impact, not you. Likewise, a helmet is designed to absorb the energy from a bike crash, not your head.

Traumatic brain injury image of skull and impact

The Effect of Helmet Laws

This all sounds good in theory, but how effective would helmet laws be in mitigating the effects of head injuries? There is some controversy here, which is not surprising considering their compulsory nature, but some according to the Department of Transportation, here are some statistics: 70-80% of fatal bicycling injuries are head injuries, and universal helmet use for just children would reduce annual head injuries in this group from between 39,000 to 45,000. This doesn’t even include the adult population. What about for all cyclists? What does the data tell us?

In 2018, there was a meta-analysis that looked at 21 individual studies on the effects of mandatory bicycle helmet legislation on the prevalence and severity of bike injuries. The authors found that the effects for all cyclists was a reduction of 20%. The incidence was even higher for severe head injuries, with a 55% reduction. So far, the evidence is conclusive, but currently there are only 21 states with active helmet laws for minors with varying degrees of enforcement. There is no federal bicycle helmet law, although the NTSB issued a recommendation for mandatory bike helmet laws in all 50 states.

Sources:

- US Department of Transportation

- Elsevier-ScienceDirect

What Type of Helmet Do I Need?

Even though most cycling helmets are constructed in a similar way, there are different categories and different designs that appeal to different types and styles of bike riding.

Recreational or Commuter Helmets

A basic, inexpensive helmet can be found for under $50, and is often a crossover design stylistically, meant to appeal to casual cyclists or rollerbladers.

They typically have few if any air vents, don’t look as streamlined as more performance oriented helmets, and have a more urban, contemporary look and feel.

These are perfectly acceptable for shorter rides, commuting, or matching the helmets your kids are wearing when you’re riding with the familyon weekends. They will probably get excessively hot and sweaty if you’re doing a harder or longer workout, but if you purchase a reputable brand from a reliable source and check to make sure they conform to the appropriate safety certifications, they provide a more than adequate level of head protection from a bicycle crash.

Mountain Bike or Commuter Style Helmets

Mountain bike or commuter helmets are another helmet category for essential bicycle safety, and now they start adding more air vents and look a little more streamlined than the standard hard-shell helmet.

The one notable characteristic with this style of helmet is that they often come with a visor to block the rain or the sun. Dedicated mountain bike helmets also tend to be a little more stout and offer a little more protection in the event of an off-road bike crash, but the main difference is often simply price and style, so if you need a basic helmet for your ride to work, a helmet from a reputable brand in the $50-100 range should provide a good level of protection in the event of a bicycle collision.

Road Helmets

When we get to the category of dedicated road helmets, we now start entering the realm of high tech. Costing anywhere from $100 to $400 or more, road style helmets are designed to be lightweight, streamlined, and often come with multiple air vents and ducts to direct cool air over your head when you’re sweating and working hard.

They look fast just sitting on your head, which is certainly not a requirement - or even to everyone’s personal taste - but advanced design allows these helmets to ride that knife’s edge of lightweight, minimalist, and aero while still providing a certified level of bicycle safety for your head if you happen to go down in a bike crash. Still, with all that tech, they are still mostly constructed from our humble polystyrene beer cooler material and ABS plastic, which says a lot about the level of engineering that goes into them.

Finding the Right Size Helmet

Finding the right sized helmet can be a challenge to new riders simply because there is a lot of variability in sizing standards from manufacturer to manufacturer.

You can measure your head in centimeters with a cloth tape measure, and in a lot of cases the manufacturer will include a handy chart on the

box or the inside of the helmet, but in the many cases in which they don’t there are some things to look for when choosing a helmet.

There should be perhaps 1-2 inches of space between the top of your ears and the sides of the helmet. If there is more of your head showing, or if it looks like it’s sitting on top of your head, it’s probably too small.

You should be able to adjust it so it feels slightly snug when on your head, but not too tight or uncomfortable. Try to notice if there are pressure spots.

There should be about the same amount of distance between the tops of your eyebrows and thefront of the helmet - between 1 and 2 inches. Too much of your forehead showing means it’s too small

If you can’t get it to feel comfortably snug or if it sags down to eye level or feels like your head is swimming inside of it, try a smaller size.

If you pay attention and with a little practice,

your eyes can tell which helmet seems to fit your particular head better than others.

How to Adjust Your Helmet for Proper Fit

Now that you have the right size, you need to adjust it and wear it properly. Here are some basic things to look for when adjusting your helmet to fit you:

When you buckle the chin strap, the helmet should have a comfortably snug fit. If you try moving the helmet with your hand the helmet shouldn’t slide from side to side or up and down.
The helmet should sit level on your head. Don’t move it back like a baseball cap and expose your forehead. You should look for that 1 to 2 inches of space above your eyebrows to the top of the helmet.

Use the eye test. Try looking up with the helmet on. You should just barely be able to see the rim of the helmet.
You should be able to feel some slightly snug pressure from the straps on the side of your head.
There should be space for you to slide a finger or two underneath the chin strap and give you the room to open your mouth and move your head comfortably.

Sources:

- Helmets.org

Make Helmet Wearing a Habit

With all the benefits of wearing helmets, many riders now consider wearing them as second nature - an essential habit of bicycle safety, and in communities with a knowledgeable cycling culture, a bicycle rider that is helmetless now stands out like a sore thumb and might get a stern talking to if he shows up to a group ride.

Wearing a helmet should be as second nature as wearing a seatbelt, but it’s not. Despite the clear lifesaving and head saving qualities of wearing bicycle helmets, only 18% of bicyclists wear them.

This simple act - putting on a helmet and snapping a buckle in place - would prevent 80,000 head injuries per year, and half of those prevented head injuries would be children. As it now stands, there are 80,000 people who will likely suffer the debilitating effects of head injuries for the rest of their lives.

Helmets are 85-88% effective in reducing the severity of brain and head injuries. There is simply no reason to not wear a helmet

If you or someone you know has been involved in a bicycle accident,

Bike Legal is here to help!

Visit us at BikelegalFirm.com or call 877-BIKE LEGAL ((877) 245-3534)

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